The PRISM spin taps into fears and worries over keeping data secure from prying eyes -- in this case, government agencies.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

But the PRISM spin taps into fears and worries over keeping data secure from prying eyes -- in this case, government agencies.

As far as deploying the prevention program, Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain explained in the announcement on Wednesday that "businesses want to combine the simplicity and ease-of-use associated with cloud-file sharing with the security and privacy of their own infrastructure."

The gender gap in tech is shrinking. Women are still an underrepresented minority in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but women in data and technology are no longer outliers or anomalies. For this book, author and data warrior Cornelia Lévy-Bencheton interviewed 15 women in data to learn how they achieved their current level of success, what motivated them to get there, and their views about opportunities for women.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Introducing women to STEM is now a nationwide crusade, but advancing the idea that gender diversity fuels creativity, innovation, and economic growth is still a challenge. The stories in this book are inspiring, revealing insights that will widen the path for even more women in tech.

The past two decades have seen a huge surge of women taking on key roles in the world of emerging technology. When we decided to put together this list, we were thrilled to discover dozens of outstanding candidates, and we have picked the top 25 female thought-leaders, champions, and innovators in the field.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Ms. Gentry is a data scientist and much-followed analyst and writer with deep expertise in the fields of cloud computing and Big Data. She advises Fortune 500 and 100 companies on ways to draw intelligence from data chaos, and frequently speaks to packed rooms of IT professionals at major conferences.

These are all fundamental steps toward effective digital advertising: Your digital ad isn’t worth anything if it’s viewed by a “bot” rather than a human; even if a human is sitting at the screen, your ad has to be viewable to have an impact–“viewability” being defined today as being on screen for at least one second when you click onto the site; and it has to be viewed by the right human.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

There’s room for improvement, of course: The ANA recently published a study showing that advertisers are wasting huge amounts of money through fraudulent digital ad impressions. And, over about 20,000 campaigns, data from our Digital Ad Ratings (formerly called Online Campaign Ratings) shows that, on average, only 59% of digital impressions reached the intended audience.

Using the principle of natural selection, researchers have outlined a new model of the disease suggesting that mitochondria — power plants for cells — might be at its center.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

A lot of people are realizing now that we have been focusing on the usual suspects — genetics and proteins ― and that’s brought us to a point where, despite billions of dollars in research, we are no closer to a disease-modifying therapy,” Driver said. “Of course, that’s not to suggest that genetics isn’t important, but I think what we haven’t done is to take the 20,000-foot view and ask if it is even logical to expect that changes to one protein could be responsible for an age-related disease. It just didn’t add up

It might not seem obvious, but Open Source is central in the upcoming development of the data industry. Android OS and Mozilla Firefox are just a few examples of everyday life applications used by general consumers. The truth is Open Source’s constant evolution allowed it to significantly dominate high-end technologies such as supercomputers, Big Data, Cloud platforms and web servers. A study published by the Ponemon Institute states that “more than 70% of US IT professionals prefer Open Source to proprietary software for continuity & control”. This became one of the key learnings of 2014 – the use of Open Source not just primarily for its ability to reduce costs.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Data industry pure players understood the importance of the human factor, thus their appreciation of data scientists who master all of the statistical methodologies, developer’s capabilities and machine learning skills

However, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer, a small number of respondents are realizing much higher returns. These companies have several things in common. They target business issues rather than internal IT organizational cost savings. They use inline analytics integrated into operational systems and designed to improve organizational processes. These algorithms are often, but not always, supported by data tables developed using deep dive analysis of Big Data in Hadoop. They often use databases that run either on DRAM or flash to provide real-time responses. And they eliminate traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, which are too slow to support real-time analysis of large volumes of streaming data.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

These new systems have radically changed the way Big Data is monetized and managed. Rather than providing insights to a few individuals, they are accessible to a large population of users who use the analytics to guide business decisions at all levels of the organization. They allow users to change the way operational systems work, and because they are real-time, they are forward-looking and predictive, in contrast to traditional backward-looking analysis of what the organization did in the last month, quarter or year. The extended use of data-in-memory and flash technologies to avoid magnetic media bottlenecks is an essential component of these systems. A small team of operational experts and data scientists use deep-data analytics to improve the algorithms.

Snowden raised alarm bells around data privacy for much of the public, yet the Data States are as powerful as ever. Why is this the case? A recent survey of 3,000 Internet users in the U.S., UK and Germany, commissioned by Open-Xchange, found that only 6% of U.S. Internet users have quit Facebook as a result of privacy concerns. Only 13% had quit any type of online service. This is despite the fact that many are aware of data abuses and their impact. For example, 58% of U.S. users said they did not trust Facebook to act in their best interests; nearly 60% said the same about Google; and more than a third of U.S. users didn’t trust any of the major Web services at all. So why don’t they opt out?

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

There was an interesting and important regional difference in the survey findings which may reveal part of the reason. While only 13% of U.S. users had quit any kind of online service due to privacy, almost 36% of German users have. Having grown up in East Germany, I can attest to the fact that Germans are especially conscious of privacy abuses, and partially have our bad history with the Nazis and the Stasi to thank for that.

Numbers represent the actions of real people with complicated lives. But rolling the behavior of millions of people into a single number is not always useful, or reliable. Even the most organized sets of numbers don't answer a lot of the questions we still have about user experience, like why people take action or why they don't, or how they felt about it, or what expectations they bring to the experience. Interviews, ethnographic studies, and usability tests fill in the gaps left by numeric data. But because qualitative insights are not numeric, they are often not considered data.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

In other fields, like the social sciences and medicine, there is no question that qualitative is still data. Small numbers, or thick data, still count whether they remain as narrative or are quantified. This makes sense for data-informed design too.

Most major automakers and dealer groups are very active on social media, whether posting pictures on Instagram, or interacting with customers on Twitter or Facebook. Travell said that, despite the study’s findings, social media can be important for raising initial awareness about a vehicle, but manufacturers still need real salespeople to close the deal.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

In a survey released last year, car-shopping website AutoTrader.com said 95 percent of those in their 20s and early 30s do their car shopping online — and 50 percent use their smartphones, up significantly from previous years. While researching, the would-be buyers visit third-party sites — like AutoTrader or Edmunds — 51 percent of the time and go to dealerships less often.

Despite the lack of customer outcry, it was "a significant event for someone with the infrastructure investment and maturity of Google," said David Jones, a performance analyst at Dynatrace, a service that monitors hundreds of Internet services from a global network of end-user end points.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Google took some remedial actions that lessened the impact to about 15% of Compute Engine customers shortly before 1 a.m. PST (9 a.m. GMT), according to a statement about the outage on the Google Compute Engine status page.

The gender gap in tech is not news, but here’s what is: it’s shrinking. In O’Reilly’s latest report — Women in Data: Cutting-Edge Practitioners and Their Views on Critical...

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Our findings reveal an important consensus among the women we interviewed — the role of female mentors and role models working in STEM is extremely important for opening up the pathway for more women to enter these fields. In fact, the impact that mentors have had on our interviewees has inspired many of them to serve as mentors to other female colleagues, and younger generations of girls, today.

Hashing out the issue of legal liability will be key for a Defense Department trying to more quickly adopt commercial cloud. Acting DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen made that clear at the Pentagon’s first cloud industry day last month, saying he had heard concerns from cloud firms about the reputational damage that could come from losing DOD data.

Bennett said Pentagon officials are still trying to figure out which data they want to host in the department’s own milCloud and which data to make available for commercial hosting. More government-industry dialogue on the subject will help prevent "finger-pointing" on the liability issue, he added.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

DISA runs 11 data centers around the world that host some 2,500 applications, he said. That wide range of applications complicates Bennett’s push for standardized IT. "The problem is, every time you optimize on an application and you create a very unique instance of that application, you're going to need unique people, people who know that application in and out," which drives up costs, he said.

Graph Databases are rapidly gaining traction in the market as an effective method for deciphering meaning but many people outside the space are unsure of what exactly this entails. Generally speaking, graph databases store data in a graph structure where entities are connected through relationships to adjacent elements. The Web is a graph; also your friend-of-a-friend network and the road network are graphs.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Graph Databases are rapidly gaining traction in the market as an effective method for deciphering meaning but many people outside the space are unsure of what exactly this entails. Generally speaking, graph databases store data in a graph structure where entities are connected through relationships to adjacent elements. The Web is a graph; also your friend-of-a-friend network and the road network are graphs.

A recent survey by Dimensional Research found that data warehousing is still considered a critical business component, in spite of its challenges of scalability and cost. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they expected to increase their investment in data warehousing, and few reported experimenting with big data and Hadoop.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Interest in big data is high, with 91 percent of respondents indicating they’ve considered an investment, but only 11 percent of respondents have a pilot in place, and just 5 percent have fully deployed a big data initiative. One of the big data roadblocks might be Hadoop, with an overwhelming majority of respondents expressing concerns, specifically about access to expertise.

If you translate IT analytics professions into their Hollywood counterparts, analysts are the stars and big data architects are the directors. It’s great to be in the leading roles. But you can’t make a movie with just stars and a director. Somebody has to build sets, manage the lighting and roll film. Our IT analytics equivalent is ETL – the difficult but totally essential process of moving data and manipulating it into the highly usable forms specified by the architects and demanded by the analysts. In this extended series on big data, I’ve so far concentrated on the essential role...

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

The implication of this is clear: in the modern analytics platform, there will be production ETL to support the type of intermediate data structures I’ve been talking about, but most deep-dive analysis tasks will require additional ETL by the analyst. Here’s where Hadoop systems make life even harder (though they have some striking advantages here too). Not too long ago, when database appliances were the high-end analytics platform of choice, people evolved a paradigm of ETL as ELT – where the transformation of the data happens after load. ELT worked because database appliances are very well suited to doing massive transformations on full files using SQL. And the fact that SQL was the transform language made this paradigm much easier for most analysts.

One way to naturally cover the long tail is to curate content as explained here. By defining a topic you’re curating on, you will naturally create connexions between keywords. This page by EcoVadis for instance makes natural connexions between words like “sustainable development”, “supply chain”, “child labor” or “procurement”. As such EcoVadis’ target audience – procurement managers, sustainable development directors, etc… – are more likely to search for keywords that include these combinations and which results will show EcoVadis’ curated content on the first page. As I write this, EcoVadis actually shows as #1 for “supply chain sustainable procurement benchmark” – a combination that might seem very long tail but that describes precisely what the company does… and what potential buyers are interested in.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

70% of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. So while you (or your CEO) might be fascinated by that one keyword that you’d like to rank #1 for, you might exhaust yourself doing that while missing opportunities

Now, let’s fast forward to 2015. Today, Leading Digital, more than ever, is the business-way to go, but IT has become surrounded by this bad aura of irrational religiousness. Many business executives are allergic to smart and intelligent technology pitches, as I tried to point out in my last TechCrunch article. Instead, Digital Transformation should be presented along with credible and intelligible down-to-earth storylines. For instance, Big Data and Analytics should be an organization’s Practical Yoke, not a costly burden.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Back in 1995, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema defined The Discipline of Market Leaders around the grand concepts of Product Leadership, Operational Excellence, and Customer Intimacy, from which organizations were expected to choose. In 2015, there is no choice; you have to do all three and keep weaving them creatively through your business. Digitally, that is!

The government showed with the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative that the answer to manag­ing a high volume of data is not to build more data centers. Instead, agencies need to create greater efficiencies in their data storage with technologies such as flash storage, cloud computing and storage management software.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Agencies spend 25 percent of IT budgets solely on storage — a sobering number considering data is expected to grow 800 percent over the next five years. It’s imperative for IT managers to find the right storage solution for their environments, which require scalability and the ability to grow with their data while avoiding service delays that reduce productivity

I remember the days of Bezdek, fuzzy c-means clustering. My humble team developed algorithms to classify landmines in Angola. We spent a lot of time looking at the data, matrices and vectors before selecting a random sample group. Principal component analysis was another popular method to compress the data to decrease the cost of algorithms. It was not too long ago that I wrote my dissertation on it in 2010.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

These were the days that MATLAB crashed over and over, had problems with averaging and filtering. We all needed to validate what we were doing. I was wondering if we still need to validate what we are doing with data and try to learn from the nature of the data? Or else, are we a step further that all datasets are the same? Can we trust to commercial products and press a button to puke graphs and histograms? Is that why data science became so sexy?

If women continue to leave the field, an already dire shortage of qualified tech workers will grow worse. Last summer, Google, Facebook, Apple and other big tech companies released figures showing that men outnumbered women 4 to 1 or more in their technical sectors.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Plenty of programs now encourage girls and minorities to embrace technology at a young age. But amid all the publicity for those efforts, one truth is little discussed: Qualified women are leaving the tech industry in droves.

Conde Nast has grabbed Ky Harlin, BuzzFeed’s director of data science, and will put him to work as its vice president of growth and data science, a new position for the magazine heavyweight. Via a press release, Conde digital director Fred Santarpia said Harlin is going to “devise unique business solutions and identify new growth opportunities.”

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Translation: BuzzFeed has gotten really good at generating online eyeballs, and a lot of that has to do with the team of smarties they’ve got analyzing data. We want to do the same thing.

"I hope my story inspires someone who hasn't had the 'normal' career to see there are many ways to push through adversity.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

For this book, author and data warrior Cornelia Lévy-Bencheton interviewed 15 women in data to learn how they achieved their current level of success, what motivated them to get there, and their views about opportunities for women.

Levy-Bencheton says that introducing women to STEM is now a nationwide crusade (she's American, what she meant to say was 'international' and 'global'), but advancing the idea that gender diversity fuels creativity, innovation and economic growth is still a challenge.

For many of them, it isn’t only about compensation – though it is important for them to understand what they earn versus their peers. Also, unlike many MBAs, data scientists often don’t harbour ambitions to be the next CEO.

Instead, they are more motivated by recognition and respect from their peers than by the opinion of their supervisors. They are more inspired by cracking difficult problems than by implementing and maintaining the solutions they come up with.

Carla Gentry CSPO's insight:

Companies such as Walmart are not afraid to give their data scientists difficult tasks. They take a pragmatic view and treat them as they do others involved in difficult and future-orientated quantitative tasks. At the same time, they recognise that data scientists work with unique types of data – such as unstructured information flows from social media channels

Couldn't agree more about the issue of motivation here and come across this point on an almost daily basis:

"they are more motivated by recognition and respect from their peers than by the opinion of their supervisors. They are more inspired by cracking difficult problems than by implementing and maintaining the solutions they come up with."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.